Category: Foliage

Garden inspiration

Butchart sunken garden pano

Here’s the chief reason for our recent visit to Victoria: The Butchart Gardens. We’d never been there in spring and I was longing for tulips, lots of tulips. After winter’s grey palette, Butchart was an explosive celebration of spring.

Butchart colorful pond

The Butchart Gardens are 55 acres reclaimed from a limestone quarry and are designated a National Historic Site of Canada. They are the result of over 100 years of loving care and stunning design. The Sunken Garden I’m showing you today starts with a lookout (in the top photo). Ponds reflect some of the spectacular rhododendrons, willows, and other foliage in the shot above.

Butchart layers

The gardens have paths that wind through beds planted with masses of flowers. In spring it’s daffodils, tulips, fragrant hyacinths, forget-me-nots, and more. Beautifully shaped trees and larger shrubs complete the picture.

I think I can honestly say that this is one of my favorite places in the world. I’ll show you more of these incomparable gardens in the coming days.

Tree in early spring

That tree

I’m again visiting the big willow tree at the east entrance to the Dungeness Recreation Area. I last showed it to you in autumn here. One of my favorite trees – I walk past it almost daily – it was pruned about a month ago on its right side. Equestrians are less likely now to collide with its lower limbs.

That tree robin

Its leaves are just beginning to unfurl. This is a closer view with a camera-impatient robin taking wing.

Chilly

Frost 2

We went from wet to freezing overnight the other night, from flooding to frozen. The new year launched with the coldest night yet, 18 degrees F (7 C.). It gets cold like this when the skies are clear. This gives us frost, not snow.

Frost 1

It snows here when freezing precipitation travels south from the Frazer River Valley in British Columbia. So far it’s kept the snow to itself. But it’s certainly cold enough to bundle up.